Related papers: Censors' Delay in Blocking Circumvention Proxies
In recent years, significant research efforts have focused on improving blockchain throughput and confirmation speeds without compromising security. While decreasing the time it takes for a transaction to be included in the blockchain…
Advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) have revolutionized the digital age to a point where animate and inanimate objects can be used as a communication channel. In addition, the ubiquity of mobile phones with increasing…
This paper presents new methods enabling anonymous communication on the Internet. We describe a new protocol that allows us to create an anonymous overlay network by exploiting the web browsing activities of regular users. We show that the…
We analyzed the generation of protocol header fields in the implementations of multiple TCP/IP network stacks and found new ways to leak information about global protocol states. We then demonstrated new covert channels by remotely…
The success of generative AI relies heavily on training on data scraped through extensive crawling of the Internet, a practice that has raised significant copyright, privacy, and ethical concerns. While few measures are designed to resist a…
Browser extensions have been established as a common feature present in modern browsers. However, some extension systems risk exposing APIs which are too permissive and cohesive with the browser's internal structure, thus leaving a hole for…
The Tor network enhances clients' privacy by routing traffic through an overlay network of volunteered intermediate relays. Tor employs a distributed protocol among nine hard-coded Directory Authority (DA) servers to securely disseminate…
Firewalls are security devices that perform network traffic filtering. They are ubiquitous in the industry and are a common method used to enforce organizational security policy. Security policy is specified on a high level of abstraction,…
A sequence number checking technique is proposed to improve the performance of TCP connections in mobile ad hoc networks. While a TCP connection is initialized, a routing protocol takes the responsibility for checking the hop count between…
The rise of ad-blockers is viewed as an economic threat by online publishers, especially those who primarily rely on ad- vertising to support their services. To address this threat, publishers have started retaliating by employing ad-block…
In mid-2025, Iran experienced a novel, stealthy Internet shutdown that preserved global routing presence while isolating domestic users through deep packet inspection, aggressive throttling, and selective protocol blocking. This paper…
The Tor anonymous network has become quite popular with regular users on the Internet. In the Tor network, an anonymous path is created by selecting three relays through which the connection is redirected. Nevertheless, as the number of Tor…
Current best practices heavily control user permissions on network systems. This effectively mitigates many insider threats regarding the collection and exfiltration of data. Many methods of covert communication involve crafting custom…
Stream-based communication dominates today's Internet, posing unique challenges for anonymous communication networks (ACNs). Traditionally designed for independent messages, ACNs struggle to account for the inherent vulnerabilities of…
Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) have been introduced as essential and popular security gates that inspect incoming HTTP traffic to filter out malicious requests and provide defenses against a diverse array of web-based threats. Evading…
Web crawling is the problem of keeping a cache of webpages fresh, i.e., having the most recent copy available when a page is requested. This problem is usually coupled with the natural restriction that the bandwidth available to the web…
Anonymity networks are becoming increasingly popular in today's online world as more users attempt to safeguard their online privacy. Tor is currently the most popular anonymity network in use and provides anonymity to both users and…
Anonymous microblogging systems are known to be vulnerable to intersection attacks due to network churn. An adversary that monitors all communications can leverage the churn to learn who is publishing what with increasing confidence over…
In time-sensitive networks, bounds on worst-case delays are typically obtained by using network calculus and assuming that flows are constrained by bit-level arrival curves. However, in IEEE TSN or IETF DetNet, source flows are constrained…
Efforts by content creators and social networks to enforce legal and policy-based norms, e.g. blocking hate speech and users, has driven the rise of unrestricted communication platforms. One such recent effort is Dissenter, a browser and…